vba - Macro - delete rows based on date

Question

I am very new to VBA and macros in Excel. I have a very large excel spreadsheet in which column A holds dates. I am trying to delete the rows which have a value smaller than a certain date and this is what I have come up with till now..

Sub DELETEDATE()
Dim x As Long
For x = 1 To Cells.SpecialCells(xlCellTypeLastCell).Row
Debug.Print Cells(x, "A").Value
If CDate(Cells(x, "A")) < CDate("01/01/2013") Then
Cells(i, "A").EntireRow.Delete
End If
Next x
Next i
End Sub

I am receiving a Next without For error... can somebody help please?

Answer 1

This lends itself well to using the .AutoFilter property of a Range. The script below contains a comment for each step taken:

Option Explicit
Sub DeleteDateWithAutoFilter()

Dim MySheet As Worksheet, MyRange As Range
Dim LastRow As Long, LastCol As Long

'turn off alerts
Application.DisplayAlerts = False

'set references up-front
Set MySheet = ThisWorkbook.Worksheets("Sheet1")

'identify the last row in column A and the last col in row 1
'then assign a range to contain the full data "block"
With MySheet
    LastRow = .Range("A" & .Rows.Count).End(xlUp).Row
    LastCol = .Range("A" & .Columns.Count).End(xlToLeft).Column
    Set MyRange = .Range(.Cells(1, 1), .Cells(LastRow, LastCol))
End With

'apply autofilter to the range showing only dates
'older than january 1st, 2013, then deleting
'all the visible rows except the header
With MyRange
    .AutoFilter Field:=1, Criteria1:="<1/1/2013"
    .SpecialCells(xlCellTypeVisible).Offset(1, 0).Resize(.Rows.Count).Rows.Delete
End With

'turn off autofilter safely
With MySheet
    .AutoFilterMode = False
    If .FilterMode = True Then
        .ShowAllData
    End If
End With

'turn alerts back on
Application.DisplayAlerts = True

End Sub

Running this code on a simple example (on "Sheet1" in this picture) that looks like this:

Will delete all rows with a date older than 1/1/2013, giving you this result: